This is a preprint of an article contributed to Against the Grain, and may not be reproduced without permission.
Last update: 5/17/01
A Century of Progress
After spending over twenty-five years at American Book Company
and Harcourt Brace working successively as apprentice, junior editor,
promotion manager, and in numerous back-office positions
including Director of Systems, Peter Adams became a consultant,
first with Quantum Science, a high-technology
current-awareness firm, and most recently with
Moseley Associates, Inc., where he has been since 1989.
Adams majored in English at Columbia University,
and received an M.A. from New York University's
Graduate Institute of Book Publishing. He serves currently
on the adjunct faculty of NYU's Center for Publishing and on
the Editorial Board of Publishing Research Quarterly.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1931-1960: Electric Publishing
1961-1980: Early Electronic Solutions and Their Impact
1981-1990: Things Come Together
1991-2000: Things Hang Together
Last Text Update 4/27/01
In 1901 the typical publishing house would have had very few typewriters and no copiers. For the most part, authors continued to submit manuscripts in longhand and editors processed them by hand and forwarded them, with production markup, to the composition house. Costly typewriters were available but were not universal. Correspondence was processed manually but carbon paper helped in retaining an office copy of letters that went out.
Home delivery of newspapers was carried out principally by children.
1901-1930: As It Was
§ Copy Preparation:The "typewriter"--both the machine and its operator were so called--plus loose carbon paper constituted, together, office automation. Mss were rekeyboarded repeatedly, with carbons, well into the '60s.
§ Composition:
Outside specialists -- compositors--set type and justified everything from menus to encyclopedias either by hand-setting foundry type or at the keyboard of the newly-developed Linotype and Monotype machines, then available since 1890. Proof sheets the length of a printer's galley tray were returned to the editor for correction and later casting off into pages. Illustrations were engraved in wood or copper, or processed as half-tones by a costly photographic method requiring yet another group of outside specialists. Such costly effort, together with the aura of gravity and permanence associated with metal type and letterpress, made for meticulous design, layout, editing and "correcting of the press," often lacking in today's era of instant solutions.
§ Printing and Binding:
At the start of the period, the letterpress process - in which pages of metal type locked into a forme were inked and pressed into a sheet of paper - was the only choice, no matter what the material to be replicated. High-quantity, high-speed methods, such as the use of stereotype plates for long press runs, had been developed to achieve some economies of scale. Colossal web-fed rotary presses worked well for newspapers but were not feasible for scholarly monographs and journals with their relatively limited circulation. Offset lithography, first developed in 1905, slowly began to challenge letterpress printing. The virtues of offset included better print quality on unsurfaced papers, less ink consumption, faster throughput, reliable color processes, and easier make-ready through the use of lightweight zinc plates. A century-long transition from letterpress began and is still in progress. Book papers of the period, alas, were "improved" with acid-rich processes, a practice that produced much of the "slow fires" that threaten the survival of much printed matter of the era.
§ Short-Run Manufacturing:
Book and journal printing in short-run quantities was unthinkable for all but the most exotic of limited collector's editions. Although printing costs were relatively low, economies of scale dictated that press runs should exceed 500 to 1000 copies.
§ Marketing and Distributing:
The chief marketing methods for books were reviews, book departments, advertising in periodicals, and the judicious use of serialization in magazines, still used today. Salesmen called on bookstores and wholesalers. Coupon ads, the precursors of today's direct mail, used catchy headlines and beguiling copy to attract buyers for products such as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf of Books or Doubleday's Book of Etiquette. In 1926 the Book of the Month Club opened a new, direct channel for marketing books via the mail; the Literary Guild followed a year later. Booksellers, at first disturbed by the potential threat to their business, eventually approved book clubs because of their ability to reach and develop new readers and customers.
§ Back Office:
The publisher's back office was powered by good penmanship, a few manual typewriters, and carbon paper with some support from spirit duplicators from Gestetner and A.B. Dick. Specialist correspondents clarified orders and maintained accounts, transcribing orders onto shipping documents for warehouse, and filing many copies with elaborate indexing systems by customer, date, or title. In 1912 the US Postal Service began shipping Parcel Post, reducing the dependency of publishers on private freight forwarders.
By 1955 the publisher's office would have come a long way from the turn of the century. Typewriters, now plentiful and cheap, would be everywhere. Many facilities were air-conditioned. The mass-market paperback book was everywhere (except in bookstores). New machines, for duplicating from stencils, copying, and platemaking were being tried. New media such as fax and microfilm, were the subjects of experiments. Punched-card equipment invaded the back office and printing companies were changing over to offset lithography as illustrations and color crept into publications.
§ Copy Preparation:
Two devices were developed in the 1940s that enabled in-house copy preparation: the Varityper and the slightly later IBM Executive Electric Typewriter with proportional spacing. The Varityper used a fixed type element that was joggled (in the manner of the much-later IBM Selectric) to impress each character into the paper. The Varityper operator entered a line of text twice - first to get the character count and second to produce the justified line. The IBM Executive with proportional spacing was able to produce acceptable but unjustified camera-ready copy. Some publishers were able to "set" acceptable copy using these devices (see "Short-Run Manufacturing" below).
§ Composition:
Linotype and Monotype composition machines were joined by Ludlow and Intertype devices. In 1956, research into photomechanical methods produced the first Photon, based on a photographic type matrix, but the technology was not to spread until the 1960s.
§ Printing and Binding:
Advances in perfect binding enabled the development of mass-market paperback books in the 1930s. High-speed rotary magazine presses, dragooned into use for manufacturing huge quantities of Armed Services Editions in uniform format during World War II, provided valuable lessons in manufacturing. During the period, offset, whose advantages were understood first by consumer-magazine publishers, and during the 1940s by publishers of four-color school textbooks, continued to grow. Practical microfilm cameras, readers, and printers were introduced in the 1940s, although the technology had been developed much earlier. The first major application of microfilm was the recording of 22 million pages of English literature for the British Museum, another wartime application. Microfilm quickly became accepted as a substitute for the publication of dissertations, and UMI adroitly became a repository for abstracts. The university presses, liberated from this task, enlarged their editorial programs beyond the confines of their own campuses; the growth thus begun in wartime continues today. It was believed that microfilm would also foster the printing on demand of entire works, but the technology did not catch on for general distribution of print.
§ Short-Run Manufacturing:
Fueled in part by mimeograph and spirit duplication, short-run techniques began to emerge out of need for alternatives to giant press runs and out of wartime necessity: the Japanese surrender documents were prepared by Varityper and printed by Multilith, the emerging small-scale offset press. After the war, the IBM Executive was combined with a new electrostatic ("xerographic") process to transfer camera copy of scientific articles from typed originals to Multilith plates for the short-run manufacture of journals at publishing houses such as Consultants Bureau - an early instance of end-to-end in-house publishing. This technique avoided the use of an out-of-house photo studio to shoot the originals and transfer them photographically to offset plates -- a costlier and slower process.
§ Marketing and Distribution:
Armed Services Editions taught publishers that the appetite for books of all kinds was not limited to bookstore customers, and to an extent emboldened early paperback publishers such as Penguin, Pocket, Bantam, and Signet to broaden their lists considerably to offer Homer and Dr. Spock along with the usual popular fiction and how-to literature. These books were distributed to many more mass-market outlets -- drugstores, newsstands, railroad stations, bus terminals and airports -- than is the practice today. Facsimile transmission experiments were begun by newspapers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offering "radio facsimile" copies of the paper to properly equipped customers in 1938. The development of microfilm also offered the promise of printing-on-demand, but the technology did not catch on for general distribution of print.
§ Back Office:
The hard-pressed clericals of the back office began to use punched-card equipment for gathering sales and inventory information from invoices. Many publishers adopted machines like the Friden Flexowriter or Computyper to prepare invoices and produce punched paper tape as a by-product for later processing. The quest for a way to connect devices and processes was under way, but it would take longer than anyone could have imagined to find reliable and usable solutions.
By the mid-1970s the publisher's office had been transformed again. The principal goal of technologists was "machine-readable" text that could be edited and formatted without being keyboarded again.
The spread of the plain-paper copier, begun by the Xerox 914, affected editorial and production units, plus the back office. By the end of the 1980s futurists were predicting the "paperless office" based on networked word-processing machines. With copiers everywhere, however, publishers went the other way. The development of "what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG)" display and output technologies were to come later. Experiments with data communication were begun in the dark recesses of the DP department. Early providers of on-line data (OCLC, Medline, Dialog) were launched but audiences were small.
§ Copy Preparation:
Publishers and technology companies sought after "electronic publishing" - without real success. The IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MTST) was an improvement over devices such as the earlier pneumatic RoboTyper for copy preparation and promotional mailing. The later Magnetic Card Selectric was a step forward. The magnetic media were, of course, incompatible with the mainframe computers of the day, preventing the use of computers for sorting or indexing.
Various electronics companies such as Wang Laboratories experimented with "word processors" - text editors and formatters to provide the functionality that IBM's Administrative Terminal System never could. In spite of obstacles, Wang and Lanier in the late 1970s marketed successful minicomputer-based WP systems that publishers could use for copy management. These systems featured on-screen editing and formatting, but no WYSIWYG. They were encumbered by slow and cantankerous daisy-wheel printers. Some WP manufacturers, including Wang, offered a small and limited-font photocomposition system as an output device, elevating in-house composition to a new but problematic level. In-house facilities trying to compete with traditional outside composition shops suffered from four crucial handicaps:
(1) no second or third shift,
(2) no staff experts in the special handling of customer input,
(3) no other customers, and
(4) no budget for entertaining their one customer.
But the quest for high-end in-house composition would not end with the word processing systems of the '70s, whose days were numbered.
§ Composition:
Unmindful of the developments within their publisher-clients, the composition firms, from 1965 to 1980, perfected electronic photocomposition and rapidly displaced thousands of traditional Linotype and Monotype machines along with their highly-skilled operators in many cases. Photon had started things in France in the 50s, but, spurred by machines such as RCA's heavy-duty VideoComp (1966) which used photo-matrices but was attached to a costly mainframe, other companies moved ahead to market equipment based on cathode-ray etching of characters based on electronic fonts. and later to laser imaging in just a few years. From 1970 to 1980, more than 100 machines were introduced. These included Compugraphic, Harris' TXT, Mergenthaler's VIP, and the Photon 7000 which later became Autologic. The next wave of machines used laser engines to create output directly on paper.
§ Printing and Binding:
From 1961 onward, printing and binding technologies became ever more refined, with photo-offset lithography, driven by the publishers' growing infatuation with color, continued to make gains over letterpress. Acid-free paper was introduced to correct the problems caused by earlier "improvements" in papermaking that occurred at the turn of the century. The big gains, however, were in the short-run arena.
§ Short Run Manufacturing:
The Xerox 914 plain-paper copier, and its offspring, dramatically increased the choices open to short-run customers. Copy shops proliferated to serve smaller firms while larger publishers spread copiers into every department. It was now possible to replicate small batches of paper originals that had a professional look if not always of the highest typographic quality.
§ Marketing and Distribution:
New ways to distribute books were being studied. In the early 1960s the promise of the teaching machine (delivering instructional "software" in lieu of printed textbooks) seemed just around the corner. RCA, CBS, Westinghouse, Xerox, and other electonics companies purchased publishers only to divest them later when it became apparent that the machines were not soon going to be adopted in schools.
Visionaries like Alan Kay experimented with handheld devices like the DynaBook (1975), but almost all the required computer components were still too big, and too slow, to make "personal readers" practical. Late in the 1970s a few pioneering on-line services such as OCLC, Medline, and Dialog were launched, mostly for professionals.
§ Back Office:
Mainframe computers spread as the IBM 360/370 and its rivals became available at ever lower cost and improved performance. The programs to run in-house order processing and similar activities were all hand-written by the publisher because off-the-shelf business systems for publishers were not developed until the minicomputer boom of the mid to late 1970s.
By the very early 1980s computers were no longer confined to a glass-fronted ultracool showcases. Smaller machines began to proliferate in and around editorial and production offices. These machines, the remarkably expensive word processing systems of the era, proliferated and were frequently set up next to the desktop computers that eventually were to replace them. The use of facsimile transmission, originally the province of the legal department in the '60s, became widespread among the publishers after the introduction off the digital Group III fax standard. Authors whose articles were "almost finished" found that they had no place to hide.
§ Copy Preparation:
The migration of "word processing" software from minicomputer-based systems to the personal computer took place during this decade. The triggering event in this period was the confluence in 1984 of the graphical user interface (Apple Macintosh) with the Apple LaserWriter and Aldus PageMaker, leading to WYSIWYG at the display and on paper, joined with what became the PostScript page-description language. This combination allowed in-house editors and production persons to create and modify finished pages to be sent outside only for mastering in final form. Copy preparation and composition became the same process.
§ Composition:
Composition houses repositioned themselves as service bureaus and output houses, providing services that continued to be impractical for their customers to attempt in house.
§ Printing and Binding:
High-speed offset presses were now supplemented, in special applications by computer-driven laser printers, of which an early example was the Xerox 9700, used to produce frequently-updated text, tables, and charts for Value Line.
§ Short Run Manufacturing:
Large-scale copiers such as the Xerox 5000 series enabled short-run printing, collation, and tape binding of some book-length material.
The Xerox DocuTech (1988) made possible the storage of sets of originals for re-use and practical printing on demand. The DocuTech's relatively high price discouraged its wide use in publishing.
§ Marketing and Distribution:
Pioneering on-line services continued to grow, but were hampered by prevailing data communications technology that required a slow and constant peer-to-peer "connection" in order to transfer information.
Chain bookstores such as Waldenbooks and B. Dalton grew to dominate trade book distribution.
§ Back Office:
Minicomputers and their off-the-shelf publishing systems suffered as the wave of personal computers, started by the IBM PC in 1981, splashed through business offices and accounting departments. Nevertheless, it took a decade to transfer stable business software to the PC because of memory and speed limitations on early models.
Stacks of modems proliferated in the DP departments as data communications between back office, branch office, and warehouse became cost-effective for transmitting orders and similar applications.
The "paperless office", long-predicted but totally elusive, waits and waits for its rightful place. The author can write using word-processing software and almost at once, FTP the result to a server on the World Wide Web--sans paper, sans proof, sans layout, design, composition, or proofreading by a corrector of the press, sans presswork, sans binding, shipping or billing, sans wholesaler, bookshop, or newsstand--as this article was originally created and posted. In doing so, the author denies himself of the support of many hands, readers, and advisors who in 1901 provided support, encouragement, correction, and improvement.
It is sad that they are gone. They will be missed. And, without apparent reason, our "workplace", which used to be an office, is still knee-deep in paper.
§ Copy Preparation and Composition:
Desktop machines with lots of memory and good network capabilities drove the spread of Mac-based copy preparation and design. Quark Xpress came to dominate the page-makeup field. Other electronic formats such as Adobe Acrobat emerged for other purposes. The much-feared incompatibility between the Mac and IBM PC was overcome or neutralized.
§ Printing and Binding:
Mergenthaler-Hell and others developed new lower-cost presses for short-run in color. Research and development produced ways to produce plates direct from the publisher's final-form output.
"Printing on-demand" devices proliferated, but were still somewhat hampered by lack of a compact binding feature to finish bound books with a professional appearance.
Endless experiments with handheld reading appliances, or "ebooks," as a substitute for print, sputtered -- starting with the Sony ReadMan of 1991 and ending with the Franklin eBookman of 2000. In the words of the futurist Paul Saffo, "Like a comet in some giant, loopy orbit, the electronic book comes around every 8 or 10 years, not quite hitting the Earth but coming closer each time."
§ Short Run Manufacturing:
IBM introduced the Infoprint 2000, a high-speed web-fed laser-print device that became the basis of Lightning Print in 1997. Other, smaller machines have entered the market. Printing on demand has now been joined by "delivery on demand" via the World Wide Web to desktops, the abovementioned reading appliances, and hand-held personal information managers such as the Palm Pilot. Serious questions about print-on-demand remain, especially marketing and where ideally to situate the machines.
§ Marketing and Distribution:
The confluence of lower-cost telecommunication, ease of use of client-server architecture (no more connection problems), and the attractive visual idiom of the World Wide Web brought an audience of millions to an immense global network. This is changing marketing, with easy-to-find websites helping customers find books, journals, and articles for sale. Some even say that authors will no longer need publishers in order to reach the public.
§ Back Office:
Networking continually tightened the links between publishers, wholesalers, booksellers, and consumers. Large publishers with many imprints and business units engaged in large-scale rebuilding of in-house systems at great cost.
Rather than rely on intermediaries, many -- journals publishers in particular -- have now built e-commerce hubs of their own.
The publishing process--the mean time from manuscript to printed copy -- has improved, on average. Modern tools make it easier and cheaper to take a simple text through the process of publication. However, rapid publication is nothing new: in 1953, given limited access to the Yalta papers, the New York Times, in a single day, managed to transmit the full text of 383,000 words from Washington DC to the composing room in New York, producing a 50-page supplement to the morning paper. It would be easier to do this today, since the combination of ThermoFax copiers and teleLinotype has been replaced with better scanners and faster transmission; but how much faster?
And our newspapers are still delivered by children.
The Impact on People and Professions
Authors and Editors, in the opinion of many, still have difficult tasks not much improved by twentieth-century technology. Authors must create. Editors must find new sources of talent and nurture them.
Production people within the publishing house have changed greatly. Originally designing and marking up manuscript, these individuals have now brought new tools to bear in the entire graphic-arts process -- working with images, tables, and all forms of matter to be disseminated -- all in house.
Typesetters, compositors, phototypesetters, and printers have to a large extent disappeared. More and more of the prepress process has migrated back to the publisher. Printers, now almost entirely pressmen on large photo-offset facilities, continue their craft with skill and precision. The lower-end job printer has been replaced by copy shops and chains of copy shops.
Marketing and Distribution personnel have better tools than in earlier times. But the mission -- to reach as large an audience as possible -- remains daunting.
Back-office staff have found that the "paperless office" has not quite yet arrived. New tools for record-keeping and reporting have not simplified the business side of publishing, as authors and agents create ever-increasing numbers of royalty arrangements on which reports must be rendered.
In other words, automation has impacted publishing jobs quite selectively. It has ended the careers of many craftsmen in the graphic arts while creating opportunities for anyone with a computer to become an artist.The Impact on Processes
The process of writing is easier for some, and will become easier still when the obstacle of the keyboard is removed by reliable voice-to-computer systems for creating text, and by improved methods of editing text and images on screen.
of 20th-Century Publishing Technologies
[in preparation] General references: On-line encyclopedias such as Encarta and Britannica present useful histories of printing and typesetting without treating technology as a topic.